Contents introduction chapter I. Purposeful reading and strategies to get students to read purposefully

1.3. Importance of getting students to read purposefully
Setting a purpose for reading helps keep students focused and engaged while reading, and gives them a mission so that comprehension can be reinforced. Reading with purpose motivates children and helps students who tend to rush, take their time reading so they won't skip over key elements in the text. Here are a few ways teachers can set a purpose for reading, as well as teach their students how to set their own purpose. Definitionally, literacy is the ability to “read, write, spell, listen, and speak.” Carol Anne St. George, EdD, an associate professor and literacy expert at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education, wants kids to fall in love with reading. “It helps grow their vocabulary and their understanding about the world,” she says. “The closeness of snuggling up with a favorite book leads to an increase in self-confidence and imagination, and helps children gain a wealth of knowledge from the books you share. And it only takes 15 minutes a day of reading together to nurture this growth.” Reading is necessary for learning, so instilling a love of reading at an early age is the key that unlocks the door to lifelong learning. Reading aloud presents books as sources of pleasant, entertaining, and exciting formative experiences for children to remember. Children who value books are more motivated to read on their own and will likely continue to hold that value for the rest of their lives. Instilling a love of reading early gives a child a head start on expanding their vocabulary and building independence and self-confidence. It helps children learn to make sense not only of the world around them but also people, building social-emotional skills and of course, imagination. “Reading exposes us to other styles, other voices, other forms, and other genres of writing. Importantly, it exposes us to writing that’s better than our own and helps us to improve,” says author and writing teacher, Roz Morris. “Reading—the good and the bad—inspires you.” Not only that, but reading is a critical foundation for developing logic and problem-solving skills. Cognitive development is “the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood”. Students often seem mystified when asked to determine what is important in an assigned reading. Teachers see this confusion when students' book pages are overly highlighted in bright yellow.⁵ Media specialists see it in requests for printing out massive numbers of documents from the Internet. Parents see it when their children complete reading assignments and equate note taking with copying entire chapters. It's frustrating for everyone concerned, but especially for the students. As one of my 11th grade students told me, Most of the time, I don't like to be told what to think, but at school I have to be told, especially when I read hard stuff. I have no idea what's important.
At the beginning of the year, I ask my students how they know something is important in an assigned reading. More often than not, they reply, "Anything in bold print is important." When I ask why bold print makes text important, they respond, "I don't know why. It just does." Clearly, these students are using ineffective reading strategies that seem logical to them. As Mike Rose notes, Every day in our schools and colleges young people face reading and writing tasks that seem hard or unusual, that confuse them, that they fail. But if you can get close enough to their failure, you'll find knowledge that the assignment didn't tap, ineffective rules and strategies that have logic of their own.Several years ago, I surveyed my fellow teachers at Smoky Hill High School in Colorado to find out what skill they thought students most needed to improve their comprehension of assigned readings. The number one response was that students don't know how to determine what is important in the text. I agree with my colleagues. Being able to distinguish big ideas from minutiae is a skill that adolescent readers desperately need. But how do we teach it?
I can often inform my teaching practice by carefully observing my own processes as a reader, noticing what I do when I start to struggle with a text and drawing on my own thinking strategies. The same strategies that I use to help myself are often useful to students.
Recently, I decided to pay attention to how I determine what's important when reading an unfamiliar text, hoping that I would gain insight into how to help my students do the same. I needed to select a text that was unfamiliar to me, preferably with content out of my comfort zone. I chose a chapter in a chemistry book that several of my students were reading—and complaining about. As I started to read the chapter on ionic and covalent bonds, my mind began to wander. When I forced my attention back to the text, consciously watching my thinking, I realized that I was in trouble. I had no way of determining importance. My two stumbling blocks were lack of background knowledge and lack of clarity about how I would use the information. Because my background knowledge in this topic was limited, I thought everything was important. Because I didn't know how the information was going to be used, I decided to try to remember everything in bold print. I quickly discovered that there was a lot of bold print, and trying to remember the information without directly applying it was nearly impossible.
I concluded that the same thing probably happened to my 11th grade students in this chemistry class, and I began to appreciate what these students went through. But I also realized that if I'd started out with a purpose for my reading, I would have had a way to sort out which information was important and which was trivial according to that purpose.
We can't expect students to determine what information is important in a text if they don't know how they are going to use the information. Teachers can help students determine importance by sharing with them the purpose for reading a given text. This purpose may be to ask specific questions as they read. It could be a mission to find a specific piece of information or to read the text and form an opinion.
Giving students a purpose for their reading and telling them what's important to look for may feel like "dumbing down" content. Yet when I retrace my own reading process, I find that when I know why I am reading something, I tend to dig in deeper and work harder. When I know what I'm looking for, I read more effectively than when I think everything on the page is equally important. I know from teaching English that there are many different ways to read a given text, especially fiction. Among many possibilities, I can simply follow the plot; I can notice how the protagonist changes from the beginning of the novel to the end; I can watch for repetition of words and motifs; or I can analyze the author's use of metaphor. Usually, I notice multiple features as I read. But I rarely encounter a text and notice everything on the first read. I'm good at reading fiction and have lots of experience knowing what to look for. My students, on the other hand, are not so practiced. If I don't provide a purpose for their reading, they may not notice or remember anything, just as I didn't know what to notice in the chemistry text as an inexperienced reader of that subject.Too many educators seem to expect students to read the teacher's mind. Last summer, as my daughter Carrie was preparing for her first year in a large, prestigious, and potentially intimidating high school, she took advantage of older students' wisdom to get a feel for the school. She asked every older kid she encountered, "What do I need to do to survive my freshman year?" Interestingly enough, she always got the same answer: "Just figure out what the teachers want. Once you do that, you'll be fine."After hearing this response over and over again, I asked myself why so many kids feel the need to "figure out" what the teacher wants. Why don't teachers clarify what they want? Then I posed this question in terms of my own teaching practice. I began to wonder whether I make my students play the role of mind reader, and if so, why. Do I assume that if I told students what is important they wouldn't read or think? That I would be shirking my responsibilities by not making students figure out what's important on their own? Do I reason that no one in the "real world" is going to tell them what's important when they read something, so they'd better start figuring it out now? Yet in everyday work situations, people frequently ask questions and get clarification about key documents they read on the job. When a supervisor thinks something is important, he or she usually points it out so that employees can benefit from having a focus.Purpose is an amazing thing. Purpose not only provides a way to sort information, but it also gives the mind a job so that the reader doesn't just read the words while thinking about something unrelated to the text. If we want our students to wrestle with meaning and work hard to comprehend, teachers will have to limit the scope of reading tasks by making purpose explicit. Students often seem mystified when asked to determine what is important in an assigned reading. Teachers see this confusion when students' book pages are overly highlighted in bright yellow. Media specialists see it in requests for printing out massive numbers of documents from the Internet. Parents see it when their children complete reading assignments and equate note taking with copying entire chapters. It's frustrating for everyone concerned, but especially for the students. As one of my 11th grade students told me, Most of the time, I don't like to be told what to think, but at school I have to be told, especially when I read hard stuff. I have no idea what's important.At the beginning of the year, I ask my students how they know something is important in an assigned reading. More often than not, they reply, "Anything in bold print is important." When I ask why bold print makes text important, they respond, "I don't know why. It just does." Clearly, these students are using ineffective reading strategies that seem logical to them. As Mike Rose notes, Every day in our schools and colleges young people face reading and writing tasks that seem hard or unusual, that confuse them, that they fail. But if you can get close enough to their failure, you'll find knowledge that the assignment didn't tap, ineffective rules and strategies that have logic of their own.Several years ago, I surveyed my fellow teachers at Smoky Hill High School in Colorado to find out what skill they thought students most needed to improve their comprehension of assigned readings. The number one response was that students don't know how to determine what is important in the text.